CIAA announces new locations for games moved from NC because of HB2

The Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association has announced that the games that it relocated from North Carolina because of House Bill 2 will be played at other schools in Virginia and Maryland.

Last month, the CIAA said that eight of 10 sports championships would be relocated from North Carolina, though the signature event next year – the 2017 women’s and men’s basketball championship tournaments – will remain in Charlotte.

Relocation of the basketball games, scheduled to take place in the Spectrum Center uptown Feb. 21-25, would not be in the best interest of member institutions, the CIAA said, also citing time constraints and contractual obligations.

The CIAA, the country’s oldest African-American sports conference, said soon after the passage this spring of HB2, which limits protections for LGBT individuals, that as members of the NCAA, it opposed the bill. The NBA, NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference have already relocated events from the state over the law.

The CIAA said it will assess whether to host future games in North Carolina after this season.

The CIAA’s decision to relocate games was complicated by the fact that when it announced it would renew its contract with Charlotte for six more years in 2014, the league also said it would relocate its headquarters here from Hampton, Va. Furthermore, eight of the CIAA’s 12 member schools are located in North Carolina.

Here are the dates and the new locations for the relocated tournaments:

This story was originally published October 13, 2016 at 5:49 PM with the headline "CIAA announces new locations for games moved from NC because of HB2."